The setup and
railroading of Mansoor Arbabsiar, a mentally ill Iranian emigrant,
in the alleged “terror plot” to kill the Saudi
ambassador was completed last week when he entered a guilty plea.
The 57-year-old Iranian-American, a naturalized citizen, was charged with plotting to bomb
the Café Milano, in Washington DC, a favorite haunt of
diplomats and other bigwigs. Faced with a possible life sentence,
Arbabsiar, a former used car salesman, made his last deal: a 25-year
sentence in return for a propaganda victory for the Israel lobby.

The facts of this case
will never be known: no trial means no evidence will be presented
purportedly “proving” his guilt. What we do know is that
in the spring of 2011 — just as the war propaganda targeting
Iran was reaching a fever pitch — Arbabsiar met with a DEA
drug informant posing as a member of a Mexican drug cartel.

Of course, it was just
a “coincidence” that he chose this particular person as
his contact — or was it? According
to ABC News, the delusional Arbabsiar told a court
appointed psychiatrist:

“’I
have had so many girls. So many that you couldn’t count them. I
never had one girl more than once…. Girls love money and
cars. That was my weakness.’

“It was, in
fact, one of these women who put Arbabsiar in touch with a man in
May 2011 who said he was a member of the Mexican drug gang Los
Zetas. Arbabsiar went on to ask this cartel associate —
actually a Drug Enforcement Agency informant — to kill the
ambassador of Saudi Arabia in Washington D.C. using explosives.”

Oh please — if
that doesn’t smell like a set-up, then your nose is on
backwards. Here is an informant, who has had drug charges dropped in
return for his cooperation, and who is being paid to provide
“intelligence” to law enforcement, clearly entrapping
Arbabsiar.

The complaint, by the
way, never quotes Arbabsiar as explicitly saying he wanted to carry
out an assassination: this was no doubt suggested by the informant,
who says the deluded car dealer was “interested” in such
a plot “among other things.” Gareth Porter has suggested
these “other things” might well have been a drug deal
involving opium, a product the Iranian Revolutionary Guards —
the supposed co-plotters — are said to have a large supply of:
Arbabsiar reportedly told associates, prior to his bust, that he was
about to make some “big money.” How he expected to do
that by bombing the Café Milano is a bit of a mystery, one
that will never be cleared up — because this case will never come
to trial.

“In Mexico,
we hired a person named ‘Junior,’ who turned out to be
an FBI agent, to kidnap the ambassador. Junior said it would be
easier to kill the ambassador. I and others agreed to go along with
this new plan. We agreed to pay Junior, and to do that we
transferred money to the United States from Iran.”

It was the FBI’s
idea to blow up the Café Milano, not Arbabsiar’s. There
never was any murder plot: the FBI was manipulating Arbabsiar from
the start — not a hard task to accomplish, given his mental
state.

After his arrest, a
thorough examination
of Arbabsiar, including extensive psychological testing, indicated
he suffers from mania, bi-polar disorder, and paranoia: an MRI
indicated “abnormalities of the brain.” This was
confirmed
by Dr. Michael B. Frist, editor of the definitive Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, who extensively
interviewed not only the accused but also his family and friends.
Arbabsiar would lock himself in his bedroom, smoking cigarettes and
pacing up and down, for weeks at a time: other times he would
engage in grandiose gestures, and imagine himself a “playboy”
with “important” connections. He habitually lost his
keys, the titles to cars, and could barely function: he eventually
went broke, and couldn’t even afford to go to a dentist when
his teeth were practically falling out of his head.

In short, Arbabsiar is
the perfect fall guy.

The supposed “cousin”
working with Arbabsiar, Abdul Reza Shahlai, is reportedly a top
official in the Revolutionary Guards alleged to have been involved
in several terrorist attacks against American targets in Iraq, a
sophisticated operative with plenty of experience in this sort of
thing. Yet in a Washington Postpiece
on Arbabsiar’s alleged connection to the Revolutionary Guards,
we are told:

“It is
unclear how much Shahlai understood about his cousin’s life in
the United States and if he understood how unlikely it was that a
struggling used-car salesman in Corpus Christi, Tex., could
successfully orchestrate a high-profile international plot.”

It’s not just
“unclear” — the whole proposition portraying
Arbabsiar as some kind of international assassin is utterly
outlandish. Which is why, when the government announced their “case”
against Arbabsiar, it was metwithwidespreadskepticism and
outright mockery from analysts familiar with Iranian intelligence
operations.

The lack of evidence
against Arbabsiar hasn’t stopped the Israel lobby from cashing
in on this propaganda bonanza: Foreign Policy has published a
screed by AIPAC-affiliated “scholar”
Matthew Levitt, affiliated with the “Washington Institute for
Near East Policy,” an AIPAC front. Entitled “Why Iran
Wants to Attack the United States,” the piece never tells us
why Tehran would take such a suicidal course. Instead, Levitt avers
that the plot was “discovered” early on by US law
enforcement, who then “built an airtight case.” What did
this “airtight” case consist of? Writes Levitt:

“At the
direction of law enforcement, he then called his cousin and Quds
Force handler, Gholam Shakuri. With agents listening, Shakuri
insisted Arbabsiar go ahead with the plot. ‘Just do it
quickly. It’s late.’”

Levitt is at pains to
explain what baffled analysts in the wake of US government
allegations: “What was the Quds force thinking?” Such an
attack on a well-trafficked watering hole in Washington DC would
have killed hundreds, and surely provoked instant and deadly retaliation from the US. So what’s in it for the Iranians?

Well, you see, says
Levitt, the Iranians have come up with “a new calculus,”
which involves overseas attacks on US and Israeli targets. Giving it
a scientific-sounding appellation — “calculus” —
is supposed to give Levitt’s argument some sort of ersatz
credibility, but he cites no evidence of Iranian intentions to go
after targets on American soil. Instead, he catalogues a series of
“foiled” plots, allegedly launched by the Iranians in
collaboration with Lebanon’s Hezbollah — none of which
involved American targets, and all of which have been denied by
Tehran. His source for this?: “Israeli intelligence.”

However, even Levitt,
hardly an unbiased analyst, has to admit that “in some cases,
Iranian agents employed laughable operational security; in others,
the agents, like Arbabsiar, were kooky.”

“Kooky”
describes not only every jot and tittle of Levitt’s piece, but
also this entire phony “plot” to kill the Saudi
ambassador, which was manufactured, from the very beginning, by the
US Justice Department. Whether this was done in collusion with the
Israelis, or Holder & Co. thought up this brilliant idea all on
their own, I’ll leave to my readers to speculate.

Levitt leaves the best
for last, concluding his piece with this cliffhanger:

“The Quds
Force is sure to recover from its operational sloppiness, and
Iranian leaders appear committed to a policy of targeting Western
interests. Arbabsiar’s guilty plea ends one chapter in Iran’s shadow
war against the West, but authorities must remain vigilant for the
plots yet to come.”

What we really need to
be vigilant about is the endless stream of phony “plots”
and Israeli-fed “intelligence” designed to drag the
United States into another war in the Middle East on Israel’s
behalf. As for the “operational sloppiness” of the Quds
Force: if I were the Israelis, and their American amen corner, I’d
concentrate on the “operational sloppiness” of their own
war propaganda. The Arbabsiar “plot” to kill the Saudi
ambassador is such a transparently phony conspiracy theory that not
even Lyndon LaRouche would touch it with a ten foot pole.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

And why, in the name
of all that’s holy, did Foreign Policy magazine publish
this bilge? Ask this
horse’s ass.

I heard Paul Ryan use this fabricated story, as if it was factual. The Iranians are not stupid, which makes the case of framing them a bit more difficult, but not impossible, for the Likud media whores, cough, Andrea Mitchell etal, who will not allow opposing views to be heard.

The more disturbing thought is that these criminal warmongers could have used a bombed cafe', that killed hundreds of people as the excuse, not unlike the WTC,, to provoke a frenzy to bomb Iran. Damn the innocent lives lost in their quest to "Refashion" the middle east in favor of Israel.

If the moment had called for it, the explosives in the bombs would have been real – cf. first WTC bombing which killed several employees, including a pregnant secretary. Human life is not precious when there is propaganda point to be made. The FBI was in on that one and could have intercepted the device if they had not supplied it in the first place.

No, if the times call for a bloody shirt to wave, the whole thing will go all the way. If the public is primed to accept a simulacrum, a distorting picture that is, then the constant war machine will stop at that. Actual prisoners are nice too, because they represent a trophy – like one of those staged Texas shooting matches where the animals are run across the firing line.

The most disturbing aspect of this case for me is that American media so credulously reports this as another grand victory in our 'war on terror'. There's no 'calculus' to recalculate this phony effort and expose it for the sham it is. Major broadcast and print outlets repeat the government's line, add some bull**** of their own, and pass it on to an America growing more and more skeptical of wot's effectiveness and even its necessity. Like the war on drugs, however, wot has become an industry unto itself, so likelihood is nil of it disappearing anytime soon.

Notice how when some right wing zealot carries out an actual assault somewhere, whether it be abortion providers or Sikh temple goers in the U.S., or a Labor youth camp in Norway, they do it all by themselves without some government entrapment program helping them along. They get it done by whatever resources they have and conviction.

So the case Justin talks about here is just par for the course in our post-9/11 world. The only difference with this one is that it's not just another great "victory" in the War On Terror. We obviously need to bombs the Iranians, or else soon they'll be sacking Washington much in the same way they sacked Athens two and a half millenia ago.

We should be more worried about the EU technocrats currently sacking Athens to continue the payoffs to the bankers. That crisis and the remedy being offered (don't force the bankers to take a single penny in losses on their bad investments) is far more dangerous than the militarily surrounded Persians of today.

I wonder if these FBI/CIA/Homeland Security thugs ever entrap each other? Probably do. Can you imagine the chagrin when they finally realize that they are "playing" each other? But – no problem – things get straightened out, everybody has a laugh and the paychecks still come in twice a month.
Makes me proud to pay my taxes!

Can you imagine the chagrin when they finally realize that they are "playing" each other?

I'm not sure they're smart enough to realize the real implications of such a situation. More likely, however, when they actually do "play" each other it's due to bureaucratic bungling rather than malice.

Excellent article, once again, Justin !!!
I think another reason why the story seems so phony is that, if this had been a real plot, then the US would and should have taken new and definitive steps against Iran on discovering such a plot.
The fact that, at least on the diplomatic side, this has been dropped like a like a stone, is more evidence to support your thesis.
This, along with the recent spate of similar news stories, like the anti-muslim film seem to be much easier solved by following Murray Rothbard'sapproach by asking; "cui bono ?"

[…] and several dozen other diners swilling white wine with cracked crab. In a fine column today, Justin Raimondo reflects on the fate of fall guy Mansoor Arbabsiar now sentenced to 25 years in a federal pen for […]

[…] do the trick? Aside from a terrorist attack on the US – like the alleged (and, in my view, completely bogus) Iranian plot to blow up a Washington restaurant and kill the Saudi ambassador – which would […]

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].